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How a mathematician hacked OKCupid to find love

This is a great story. This guy should sell this service to every other OKCupider out there.

In short: he wrote up a system that created fake profiles and scanned every woman on OKCupid in his age range then he analyzed them, figured out what they wanted to talk about online, and answered their questions truthfully. Nothing he did is creepy or even cynical. It was just efficient.

Though it still took him 88 dates before he found someone he really had a chemical connection with.

With that, he created two profiles, one with a photo of him rock climbing and the other of him playing guitar at a music gig. “Regardless of future plans, what’s more interesting to you right now? Sex or love?” went one question. Answer: Love, obviously. But for the younger A cluster, he followed his computer’s direction and rated the question “very important.” For the B cluster, it was “mandatory.”

When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.

He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when some�one views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.

“I haven’t until now come across anyone with such winning numbers, AND I find your profile intriguing,” one woman wrote. “Also, something about a rugged man who’s really good with numbers … Thought I’d say hi.”

“Hey there—your profile really struck me and I wanted to say hi,” another wrote. “I think we have quite a lot in common, maybe not the math but certainly a lot of other good stuff!”

“Can you really translate Chinese?” yet another asked. “I took a class briefly but it didn’t go well.”

The math portion of McKinlay’s search was done. Only one thing remained. He’d have to leave his cubicle and take his research into the field. He’d have to go on dates.